In March 2021 the European Commission published new voluntary EU Green Public Procurement (GPP) criteria for computers, monitors, tablets and smartphones. The basic concept of GPP relies on having clear, verifiable, justifiable and ambitious environmental criteria for products and services, based on a life-cycle approach and scientific evidence base. Following the recommendations of the Communication “Public Procurement for a better environment” (COM (2008) 400), since 2008 the Commission has developed more than 20 common GPP criteria.
These GPP criteria are developed to facilitate the inclusion of green requirements in public tender documents. While the adopted EU GPP criteria aim to reach a good balance between environmental performance, cost considerations, market availability and ease of verification, procuring authorities may choose, according to their needs and ambition level, to include all or only certain requirements in their tender documents. All developed EU GPP criteria can be consulted here.
The new criteria for computers, monitors, tablets and smartphones will focus on the most significant environmental impacts during their life cycle, which have been divided into four distinct areas: product lifetime extension; energy consumption; hazardous substances; end-of-life management.
This set of criteria also includes a further category of criteria that apply to separate procurements for refurbished/remanufactured devices and related services. For each area of focus, one or more criteria are provided, accompanied by the background technical rationale and a summary of the stakeholder contributions that support the final version of each criterion.
The publication of these criteria would help SMEs to face with the future GPP requirements they could find in public tenders, at the same as giving support to procurers in the process of drafting their tenders.
The new criteria are available here.
